For more than half a century, the creation of an effective thermonuclear reactor for generating electricity has remained an unattainable task that has united scientists from many countries, several fields of science and technology. It is all the more surprising that on October 12, 2019, the American Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) approved an application filed a year and a half ago for the design of not just a working, but also a compact thermonuclear reactor. The patent holder, the US Navy, commands respect. The system promises to revolutionize energy, transport, astronautics - almost anywhere. If only it really works.
Fuzor "Professor" Farsnworth
Controlled thermonuclear fusion promises to provide humanity with an almost endless source of "clean" and safe energy. Its fuel - deuterium - can be extracted from seawater, and the reserves will last for millions of years. As deuterium nuclei merge, they release a huge amount of heat, and the reaction itself creates neither harmful waste nor the risk of explosion. However, for this, the fuel must be kept in a plasma state, at enormous pressures and temperatures. Its behavior is extremely unstable and unpredictable, requiring complex and "voracious" means of control, and even they work for a relatively short time.
All of this makes existing fusion reactors - such as tokamaks and stellarators - very complex and expensive installations. At the same time, none of them have yet managed to overcome the Lawson criterion, which is key in this area, and generate more energy than the instrument itself spends. Physicists are actively (and not without success) improving both stellarators and tokamaks, but their choice is not limited. There are other systems, theoretically capable of giving a controlled thermonuclear reaction.
The scheme of action of Fuzor Farnsworth
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One of them is the magnetic fuser, first proposed in the 1960s by the American inventor Philo Farnsworth, who became one of the founders of television and - much later - gave the name to the genius and insane Professor Hubert Farnsworth from the series Futurama. The system is a hollow, grounded metal sphere into which rarefied deuterium is pumped. In the center is a spherical mesh of conductors that serves as the cathode. The high negative charge of the cathode causes the electrons to detach from the deuterium nuclei and "drain" along the outer sphere. And the positively charged nuclei rush to the cathode, some of them slip through the grid and shrink into a dense clot of plasma.
Dynamic PE fusers
The Farnsworth Fuser is a device so simple that high school students and students often assemble it as part of educational projects. "Adult" scientists experimented a lot with it, although even after many improvements, the fusers did not become a worthy alternative to other designs. Not a single scheme was able to even come close to the Lawson criterion, therefore it is believed that fusors can be used only as a source of neutrons or isotopes born in plasma.
Schoolchildren from Washington State with a homemade fuser.
Nevertheless, it is precisely this design that is mentioned in the patent US20190295733A1 - a device allegedly capable of delivering from megawatts to terawatts of energy with a consumption of kilowatts to megawatts. It is difficult to infer from the description how the developers managed to achieve such incredible progress. According to them, the system uses "dynamic fusors" in which the supply of deuterium (or a mixture of deuterium-xenon) occurs through the cones covered with piezoelectric material.
Vibrating and rotating in opposite directions inside the vacuum chamber, the cones create a "concentrated flow of magnetic energy and electromagnetic radiation" in the chamber, allowing for a denser and hotter plasma. All these statements directly lead us to the question of the inventors themselves - first of all, about the developer from the mysterious Aircraft Division of the US Naval Aviation Center (NAWCAD) Salvatore Cezar Pais.
Stream of patents.
Observers have already noticed that Pe's new development is based on an effect described in his own previous work - "controlled movement of charges due to vibration and / or accelerated rotation." Judging by these publications, such currents are capable of creating incredibly powerful electromagnetic fields, for which the inventor finds the most incredible fields of application with enviable regularity. As recently as 2017, he received a patent for a high-temperature superconducting system that retains zero electrical resistance even at room temperature (US20190058105A1) - it also uses a vibrating piezoelectric material.
In the same 2017, Salvatore Pe and the Navy became the owners of a patent for a high-frequency gravitational wave generator (US10322827B2), a year earlier - for an aircraft in which electromagnetic fields make it possible to reduce the inertial mass (US20170313446A1) - that is, in fact, for "anti-gravity " engine. Apparently, the inventor is much closer to the professor from the fantastic "Futurama" than the real Philo Farnsworth himself was.
Indeed, none of his revolutionary concepts have yet been embodied in the real physical world. Unlike conventional patents, which must describe inventions "at the implementation level" - that is, in such details that, with the necessary knowledge, are enough to implement a novelty, a series of applications on behalf of the Navy and the Peh speaks only of "workability", describing technologies in general terms, which, they say, should be enough to confirm their realism.
Bureaucratic fiction
However, even in this form, they raise great doubts among the experts of the patent office and, as far as is known, Pe's applications have been rejected more than once before. In some cases, the approval came only after pressure on the department from the Navy, with a special mention of China, which allegedly threatens to bypass the United States in such "technologies." Some observers have wondered how much of the mass of futuristic patents the US military is struggling to acquire from time to time is related to each other. The vague description of one or the other breakthrough technology seems to hint at the imminent advent of absolutely incredible technological breakthroughs - as stated in the latest patent, "on land, in water, air, space and beyond."
It is difficult to say what is beyond land, water, air and space. And just as hard to believe that the stream of incredible technology - from a gravitational wave generator to a compact fuser reactor - is anything other than the fumes of a huge bureaucratic machine. In such regulated systems, every now and then the strangest processes and phenomena arise and develop, such as the expansion of staff to create a commission to reduce staff - and the fantastic patents of Salvatore Pe.
Roman Fishman
